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3-piece speaker systems roundup
Roundup by Chamila
Sumanasekera
March 08, 1999 |
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Introduction
Everybody loves fast graphics cards and everybody loves powerful CPUs. If there’s any love left to go around, it’s usually divided up between sound cards, DVD-ROMs, hard drives, motherboards etc. When was the last time you saw a passionate flame war over a speaker system on some message board? But hey, wait a minute: what’s the use of spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on upgrades if there is something missing? This something I refer to is sound. That’s right, sound, and more sound. After all, what’s the use of having a state-of-the-art PC if you can’t enjoy your state-of-the-art games at full flow with mind-blowing sound? Or enjoying a DVD movie with cool surround sound, or listening to those hard-earned (or rather, hard-downloaded) and valued collection of MP3s if you can’t enjoy them with real speakers?
In other words, don’t spend all your bucks on your next upgrade. Keep about $150 to $200 to get yourself a neat speaker system. Trust me, this will really make a big difference. What’s more, with the recent boom in DVD drives and computer games, the speaker industry is getting some attention too, with some well-known manufacturers putting out some impressive systems for us to review and for you to buy. But what should you go with? That’s the burning question of the moment. To help you make a decision, we’ve put together a 3-piece speaker system roundup consisting of 9 models. Each model that we selected is the best that each manufacturer offers, so this roundup is more like a best of the best scenario. Correspondingly, prices range from $110 all the way up to $400. So we’re talking about some big bucks for speakers.
To make this a fair comparison, I invited seven
people to the panel of judges. Judging sound quality is a more subjective
matter than judging, for instance, CPU performance. Opinions may differ,
sometimes considerably, from person to person, and I don’t think this roundup
would have been very successful if I were the only judge. We will also
be talking about various issues that affect the overall performance of
your speakers, so though this may be a long one you won’t be sorry after
you get through it. After all, this is an all-in-one, not a single product
review. So without further ado, let’s test those speakers.
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